WESLEY SEALE
AS UK prime minister Boris Johnson exits Downing Street, a recent poll suggested that Democrats don’t want incumbent US leader Joe Biden to run again in 2024.
The New York Times-Siena College poll pointed out that only a quarter of Democrats support Biden for a second term whereas the Harvard-Harris poll found that under a third of the party members want him to run again as president. A whopping 71% of Americans, the poll found, did not want the president to run again.
Some of the reasons provided by respondents was that the US president was either too old or his job performance was appalling.
While the results were being released, Biden was taking a trip to the Middle East to shore up US support in the region amid the rising prices of oil and the concomitant rise in inflation.
The trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Occupied Areas of Palestine has been characterised as a flop and an indication of the waning of US support in the region and the world.
According to The Washington Post, Mo Eleithee, a former communications director for the Democratic National Committee, reported that “he thought the trip ‘wasn’t a great thing’ but was ‘a necessity’.”
The same newspaper’s editorial on Monday, July 18, was titled “a low moment for Mr Biden” and concluded that the visit “was a low moment for Mr Biden, and one that he won’t soon live down.”
Aaron Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Egypt, writing in Foreign Policy, stated that “the US president’s trip was an immediate and time-limited response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, domestic economic woes, and Iran”.
The two analysts recommended that we “give the Biden administration the benefit of the doubt. Having deprioritised the Middle East for 16 months, the weeds grew”.
Employing a metaphor used by former US secretary of state, George Shultz, they insisted that we “forget immediate deliverables. Plants take time to grow, and they need plenty of watering”.
What the two commentators could not ignore though was the growing sentiment that like his domestic policy, the US president was hopeless in his foreign policy as well. Many have implied that Biden would probably suffer the same fate as Jimmy Carter did; a one-term Democrat president.
Yet it would seem that one disastrous leadership spell follows another as the West continues to crumble.
The rest of the international community would have expected better from a more experienced politician whom Biden is compared to after the disastrous years of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Johnson leaves after the catastrophic Brexit referendum, under David Cameron, and the term of the lame-duck prime minister, Theresa May.
The decline of the West, and specifically the US, continues and this is important for regions such the Middle East and Africa.
Writing 20 years ago to the week, in Al-Hayat, Palestinian academic Edward Said wrote: “A quick survey of those fifty years (of Arab and Palestinian dealings with the US} shows dramatically that neither a defiant Arab attitude nor a submissive one has made any changes in US perceptions of American interests in the Middle East, which remain the quick and cheap supply of oil and the protection of Israel as the two main aspects of its regional dominance.”
The story and survey of Africa, and American interests on our continent, will be no different. It is only about extraction and exploitation.
Seale has a PhD in international relations.